edJazmine Hester
Professor Latchman
English 102
23 November 2011
The Pain and Benefits of MemoryIn life there is mostly only one thing that reminds you of the past and that is your memory. Memories come in many varieties: happy, sad, and painful. These memories help us remember what was and how our lives have changed. In the 1987 publication Beloved, written by Toni Morrison, a family struggles with the spirit and human form of the dead daughter of the protagonist Sethe. She is experiencing memories that trigger every painful event her and the other characters have gone through throughout their lives. Sethe, was a slave at a plantation called Sweet Home and it brought her pain that she and her friend Paul D had no intentions on bring back up until Beloved comes back from the unknown and makes the two remember all the things they tried so hard to forget. Memory plays a huge role in the novel, it eventually changes who the characters “thought” they were. In the novel memories extracts emotions, actions, and thoughts. Memory made the characters feel things they forgot they could feel, but it also made them feel feelings they didn’t want to feel either. When the novel begins it talks of how Sethe tries to remember as little as she can about the hideous place she ran away from. With her lack of wanting to remember her past it has her memory of her sons Howard and Buglar fading fast. Within that same chapter she says “Boys hanging from the most beautiful sycamores in the world. It shamed her---remembering the wonderful soughing trees rather than the boys” (Morrison 9). The fact of Sethe not being able to remember much about her sons pained her. (A loss of visual memory causes a general amnesia). Sethe says "work[s] hard to remember as close to nothing as was safe" (Morrison 8).

Although Sethe tries to forget the painful memory of Sweet Home, it consumes her and keeps her from living her life to its full potential. "Her brain was not interested in the future....

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Beloved Paper
A myth is simply a way for humans to orient themselves in the world. Why did Sethe kill her own daughter and not think twice before doing it? What made that thought even cross her mind, an action that took her daughter away from her forever? It may be hard to understand this from ones point of view. Toni Morrison, in the novel Beloved, uses the character Beloved to function as a mythic archetype in the society to help the reader understand things and answer complex questions in the book, like Sethe’s actions and why she did what she did. Archetypes represent universal patterns of human nature. In Beloved, the character Beloved is the anima; she is a projection of the other characters’ desires. To Sethe, Beloved comes to her with the aim of waking her up and to make her see the real world around her. Morrison uses Beloved as a mythic archetype to explain the reasons behind the actions African American slaves take, and to show how slavery and the effects of it will always exist in the world, no matter how hard people try to forget.
Morrison uses Beloved to help explain to the reader why Sethe tried to kill her children, and how it was only an act of love and not an act of hatred or craziness. Sethe killed Beloved in fear of her children returning to slavery and having to live a life like hers when she was a slave. “I couldn’t let...

...separated into its own paragraph which brought out the importance of this statement. It showed how Morrison wanted to stress that the people who came into contact with Beloved could not remember her, and even the people who loved her eventually forgot her too. "They forgot her like a bad dream... those that saw her on the porch deliberately forgot her... It took longer for those who had ... fallen in love with her... in the end, they forgot her too." (pg 274) Morrison effectively shows the reader with that single sentence in its own paragraph that Beloved seemed almost like a bad dream, and nobody could or wanted to remember anything about her.
The next device used within the novel is point of view. Morrison effectively changes the narrator in certain chapters to help control how the reader feels and responds. In the first part of the book the narrator basically seems to be someone not involved in the story. This is effective there because it helps the reader get to know the characters separately and develop ideas and opinions about them. However, in the second part there are places where the narrator changes. For example, in one of the beginning chapters of part two, Sethe is the narrator. This helps the reader understand Sethe as a character, mother, and how she interacts with the other characters (ie: Beloved, Denver, Paul D...). For example, "How if I hadn't killed her she would have died and that is something I could not bear...

...Let Bygones Be Bygones
In her novel Beloved, Toni Morrison sets up several characters who both love and are beloved. Among them, Paul D stands out through his timidity toward love and the meaning behind love, freedom. Because of the bitter and miserable experiences suffered by him and people around him, he has learned to love just a little and escape from the reality, and is a prisoner of his past. However, throughout the novel, Paul D rescues himself by persuading Sethe to live for tomorrow, which as a whole, illustrates the final success of former slaves to pass through the desperation and towards a brighter future.
In contrast to Sethe, who “knew Paul D was adding something to her life- something she wanted to count on but was scared to” (Morrison 112) and still dares to “love too thick”, Paul D loves just “a little bit”. As a slave, he witnessed too many separations between families. He thinks that if he just loves small, he will not get hurt when the object of his love is sent away, and he chooses a tree, Brother, which cannot be taken away from him. He chooses to leave Sethe after he learns that Sethe killed her child; “he was wrong. This here Sethe was new. The ghost in her house didn’t bother her for the very same reason a room-and –board witch with new shoes was welcome. This here Sethe talked about love like any other woman; talked about baby clothes like any other woman, but what she meant could cleave the bone…...

...in his suggestion that "virtually every major character in Beloved attempts to tell the story of Sethe's infanticide of Beloved and her subsequent resurrection in a manner that confers power ... or at least ensures the continued survival of an embattled black community." This can be seen most specifically in memories, thoughts, and conversations of the characters Sethe, Baby Suggs, Denver, Paul D and Beloved. It seems Morrison shows the inherent power struggles of self that is linked to continuation of the black community through telling the story multivocally. Each voice explores the infanticide and resurrection differently and subsequently reveals different aspect of power of self. Morrison explores this using a range of narrative and literary techniques, including magic realism, shifting focalization, free indirect discourse, while continually moving between the present time and times in the past.
Perpetrator of the multivocally told story of infanticide and therefor an outsider to the black community, Sethe places her sense and power of self in Beloved’s resurrection. Prior to Beloved’s arrival, Sethe believed “the future was a matter of keeping the past at bay.” The story of the infanticide was one Sethe “could never close in, pin it down for anybody who had to ask.” So Morrison focalizes the story of the infanticide with most detail through the schoolteacher. Sethe instead tells stories of her past to...

... Faulkner’s Sound and the Fury details the lives of the Compson brothers whose lives become miserable as they are unable to move onto the past. Beloved by Toni Morrison takes it one step further and discusses ex-slaves attempting to recover from this traumatic past in different ways. However, simply than just ignoring their past, Beloved argues that to overcome a traumautic past we must confront the past and move towards the future.
The past helps to construct our identity as seen by Denver’s obsession with the past. Denver frequently urges Sethe to tell her about her birth; When telling Beloved the story of her birth and how she was named, Denver thinks “This was the part of the story she loved. She was coming to it now, and she loved because it was all about herself” (Morrison 91). Denver is cut off from the community and thus telling the story gives her a real sense of herself that the haunted house of 124 cannot give her. All that she has is the history of her birth and how she was given her name which is quite literally her identity. Since this is only identity she has, she finds any past that is not connected with hers offensive.
“They were a twosome, saying “Your daddy” and “Sweet Home” in a way that made it clear both belong to them and not to her. That her own father’s absence was not hers. Once the absence had belonged to Grandma Baby – a son, deeply mourned because that he was the one who had brought her...

...The Loss and Rebirth of Motherhood
—The Interpretation of Sethe’s Motherhood in Beloved (Toni Morrison)
Beloved, written by Toni Morrison, plays an important role in the history of American literature. This book discusses the main character Sethe, who does an understandable action but makes people hard to accept it in that social community. She loses motherhood and herself; however, under the help from black compatriots, she gets out from the haze in her heart, regains her life and finds the regressed motherhood finally. The story happens during 1873, after the American Civil War. Through Beloved, Toni Morrison shows the situation of black community in America under the later slavery and the period during the reconstruction of United States in the nineteenth century. Morrison got the ideas of Beloved when she saw a terrifying report from history resources: On January 1856, Margaret Garner, a black female slave escapes with her daughter (Mervyn Rothstein); and “when the marshals found Margaret in a back room, she had slit her two year old daughter’s throat with a butcher knife, killing her” (Casey Nichols). Morrison makes Margaret reborn as Sethe in Beloved. Sethe kills her daughter like Margaret did in the real life; however, not only strong love makes her do the crazy action, but also the horrible memories, religion traditions and lacking of family love take effect on her.
Sethe, as a...

...order to self-defense suppresses the awful emotional experience. Very often it is thoughtful that this neglecting and abandoning is the best way to forget. In Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, memory is depicted as a dangerous and deliberating faculty of human consciousness. In this novel Sethe endures the oppression of self imposed prison of memory by revising the past and death of her daughter Beloved, her mother and Baby Suggs. In Louise Erdrich’s story Love Medicine, memory of death and the past is revealed carefully among the characters of June, Gordie, Henry and Lyman. It is apparent by juxtaposing these two novels that the theme of memory of the past and death plays a major role in these characters lives. However the theme of memory is shown and depicted for two different reasons in both these novels. In Beloved, Sethe expresses an insatiable obsession with her memories with the past to understand the causes of death and then being able to cope with them. While in Love Medicine, memory is shown through a series of episodes where Gordie and Lyman attempts to bring back things alive again by revisiting the past of June and Henry through their death.
In Beloved by Toni Morrison, Sethe undergoes a self-imposed prison of memories by revisiting the past and death of her daughter Beloved. She begins by explaining to Denver the power of memories and how they are immortal. Memories have an...

...Toni Morrison effectively provides reasons for the behaviour of her magical realism and gothic horror novel characters via her style of writing and the representation of them. Beloved is mainly written in third-person omniscient. However, Morrison’s novel is written in a constant flux, changes in point of view and narrators. This in course outcomes to repetition used to reveal other perspectives and the importance of key events, as well as to carry out a main symbol or notion. Beloved is filled with symbols in which she represents her characters with, bringing out some colour in them – colour being a main theme.
Point of view in a novel establishes how much the reader engages with the characters. Morrison begins the novel in third-person omniscient, immediately introducing the characters of the novel but with no detailed descriptions. The first page of the novel gives the reader a brief explanation of what had happened, and the cause for a gloomy atmosphere and a tone of fright that is carried throughout. It also sets up the significance of the past, before Baby Suggs died and Sethe’s two sons ran away, which is revealed in Morrison’s use of flashbacks. Sethe is haunted by her memories of her past as a slave as well as the ghost of her dead daughter. Morrison incorporates a change of point of view for Sethe to reveal her inability to let go of the past; in one page, she uses both first person point of view and third person limited to do so....